Mar. 6 |
What truly terrifying
is not the terrifying,
but the absence of mindfulness.
– Wuyoukongbu
Many years ago, during one of those aimless holiday night rides with a biking buddy, we zipped up and down a popular stretch of a nearby beach. We were cycling...

Mar. 6 | The ‘DC’ in DC Comics stands for ‘Detective Comics’, but they might as well stand for ‘Darker Comics’? On both big and small screens in recent years, their characters are consistently darker than Marvel’s, and...

Dec. 26 |
‘The Kominsky Method’ is a bittersweet drama series on the challenges of two old friends growing older together, as they look out for each other while musing on life. Sandy Kominsky is an acting coach, who just lost a dear friend to sickness....

Dec. 19 | Praise and blame, gain and loss,
pleasure and sorrow
come and go like the wind.
To be happy, rest like a giant tree
in the midst of them all.
– Buddhist Saying
While Right Speech conventionally means abstaining from lying, gossip, vain talk, and...

Dec. 12 |
‘Shirkers’ (2018) is paradoxically, a documentary on a movie titled ‘Shirkers’ (1992), that did not come fully into being. The result is a full film on a half film, a film within a film, on love of films and filmmaking. Even though...

Dec. 4 | As a mother would risk her life
to protect her child, her only child,
even so should one cultivate a limitless heart
with regard to all beings.
– Karaniya Metta Sutta
You should be as devoted to cultivating and protecting your goodwill to make...

Nov. 27 |
People are first haunted by their inner demons, before they become ghosts haunting haunted places, who might in turn become others’ outer demons. Haunted by unresolved and deluded attachment and aversion, both in this life and from life to...

Nov. 19 |
Question: How do I handle a slightly senior co-worker, who is not exactly my superior, but tells other colleagues that I will do this and that. When I do not handle the ‘promised’, she tells them that I am calculative. Yet, if I do, it...

Nov. 8 | Your mind cannot hold two thoughts at once.
This means that a single thought can occupy your entire mind.
Whether good or bad, everything stems from a single thought.
If we are careful with that first thought, even tragedies can be prevented.
– Haemin...

Nov. 1 |
This imaginative telling of Lincoln’s life as a part-time vampire hunter is an elaborate allegory perhaps, of how capitalistic slave-owners were like exploitative and unrelenting ‘bloodsuckers’, who would not stop till they took over...

Oct. 25 |
Like a pure mirror,
experience the pleasant
only clearly as they are,
without any attachment.
– Shilashanti
In the Chappana Sutta, the Buddha gave two analogies… First, suppose a person caught six animals, whom he ties together with a rope, with...